The Wasp Factory

The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks, is one of the most repulsive and creepy novels I've ever read. I read it on the recommendation of Elizabeth, and while I don't entirely regret reading it, I will repeat the blurb from The Scotsman that appears on the back of my 1998 paperback edition: "There's nothing to force you, having been warned, to read it; nor do I recommend it." However, The Scotsman more recently reviews a theatrical production of The Wasp Factory, saying it misses the mark set by the novel, a "brilliant, chilling piece of island Scottish horror."

From the beginning, the protagonist of the novel, Frank Cauldhame, doesn't allow me to like him. He is first seen "making the rounds of the Sacrifice Poles...sticking one of the mouse heads back on." Although he mentions the Wasp Factory on the very first page, it's not until much later that I find out how it works; any path a wasp chooses once it's caught and put into his maze leads to a different kind of death. Gradually I find out who "Old Saul" was and why Frank keeps his skull. Eventually Frank tells me why he killed three children, one of them his younger brother.

And yet Frank is not totally monstrous, which actually makes the story even more horrible. At one point, for instance, I entirely agree with him that "life has few pleasures to compare with dam-building. Give me a good broad beach with a reasonable slope and not too much seaweed, and a fair-sized stream, and I'll be happy all day, any day." Also the reason he kills the first child is because that child deliberately killed his pet rabbits in their hutches, which doesn't make it right, but makes his impulse a bit more understandable, at least to me.

I see how alone Frank is when he says things like this:
"I've always had a rather ambivalent attitude towards something happening to my father, and it persists. A death is always exciting, always makes you realise how alive you are, how vulnerable but so-far-lucky; but the death of somebody close gives you a good excuse to go a bit crazy for a while and do things that would otherwise be inexcusable. What delight to behave really badly and still get loads of sympathy!"

But any scrap of sympathy I might momentarily feel for Frank is methodically eradicated by the next account of his killings or his philosophy: "Both sexes can do one thing specially well; women can give birth and men can kill." Any sympathy I might feel for his predicament in a nearly silent and entirely undemonstrative family is eventually undermined by something like the detailed and sickening description of what drove his half-brother crazy. The final revelation of the novel, while shocking, is almost an anti-climax for me because of the matter-of-fact way my anticipation of horrors to come has been built up throughout the novel.

I don't enjoy being horrified, and yet I took pleasure in the ironic tone of this book.